At the end of a
lively panel discussion last week featuring AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka,
UAW President Bob King and AFSCME Michigan President Mark Gaffney, among others,
Frank Mamat, an adjunct labor law professor at Wayne State University, rose to
ask the first question from the audience:

“…I
guess the 800-pound elephant in the room that nobody is mentioning in
four-and-a-half hours is what happened to EFCA? … You spent $44 million plus to
get Obama elected, you had supermajorities in both houses. My studies indicate
to me that if it had gotten passed in the first three or four months of the
administration you probably would be at 14 percent penetration now instead of
7, and two years from now maybe even 30 percent … How did it happen that your
investment was all sort of pushed off into health care as opposed to getting what
really would have totally turned around the labor movement?”

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The simple fact
that the first question posed by a university professor was about partisan politics
and lobbying says a great deal about the nature of the union movement and the
risks involved in the academic study of an institution that carries a lot of
partisan political baggage.

The Employee Free Choice Act was meant to
stem the slow but steady erosion of union membership, which has dropped from
14.3 percent of the private-sector workforce in 1985 to 6.9 percent last year. EFCA’s
“card-check” process was vulnerable
to abuse, but what matters right now is that rather than change their
recruitment practices or improve the services they provide to workers, the
union establishment counted on Congress to change the law in their favor.

Even before Professor
Mamat reminded the audience about the elephant, the discussion had featured a
menagerie of political topics. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pointed to the recent
Wisconsin Supreme Court election, in which union-backed challenger JoAnne
Kloppenburg led incumbent Richard Prosser at the time, as evidence of a political
backlash against Gov. Scott Walker’s labor law reforms. (Note: election results
have since been updated with Prosser likely to retain his post.) Trumka also
touted recall petitions against Wisconsin legislators: “We’re now going to go
into recall petitions. We have filed on two of the state senators. We have
enough votes for two more and before it’s over hopefully we’ll have enough to
do eight or nine of those senators.”

Communications
Workers of America Vice President Seth Rosen highlighted the expansion of
protests against similar labor law reforms in Ohio. Metro Detroit AFL-CIO
President Saundra Williams predicted that recalls of elected officials will
have widespread and long-lasting repercussions. UAW President Bob King
criticized Gov. Rick Snyder for his proposed business tax changes: “It’s the
biggest welfare giveaway you can ever think of. There’s not any requirement
that a single corporation brings a single
job into Michigan for that $1.8 or $9 billion that he wants to give them.”

The challenge
for academics who want to study labor is that the labor establishment is driven
by politics more than economics or conditions in the shops and job sites where
their members work. It is nearly impossible to talk about labor unions without
being drawn into political commentary. And if a professor happens to sympathize
with union objectives, the temptation to engage in political advocacy will be
constant.

There is every
reason to suspect that Wayne State’s labor studies program fell into the
political vortex. Several pages from their website, describing many of their
activities, disappeared shortly
after the Mackinac Center filed a FOIA
request meant to detect political activism among instructors. And it’s
worth noting that this labor panel did not include a single spokesman for
employers or for independent workers who have chosen not to join a union.

An academic who
studies labor will frequently be at risk of being drawn into organized labor’s
political battles. When taxpayers foot the bill for a state university, they
have every right to expect that the professors they hire will stay out of the
political fray. The line between legitimate research and political activism may
not always be obvious, but it’s one that professors — especially at state
institutions — ought to constantly keep in mind.

#####

Paul Kersey is
director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research
and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint
in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center
are properly cited.